U.N. committee grills Vatican over abuse cases

GENEVA — The dressing-down came in the unlikeliest of places, a stuffy U.N. conference room before an obscure human rights committee.

After decades of fending off accusations that its policies and culture of secrecy had contributed to the global priest sex abuse scandal, the Vatican was called to account.

U.N. experts interrogated the Holy See for eight hours Thursday about the scale of abuse and what it was doing to prevent it, marking the first time the Vatican had been forced to defend its record at length or in public.

It resembled a courtroom cross-examination, only no question was off-limits, dodging the question wasn't an option, and the proceedings were webcast live.

The Vatican was compelled to appear before the committee as a signatory to the U.N. Convention for the Rights of the Child, which among other things calls for governments to take all adequate measures to protect children from harm and ensure their interests are placed above all else.

At times, the exchanges were sharp.

“How can we address this whole systematic policy of silencing of victims?” asked committee member Benyam Mezmur, an Ethiopian academic. “There are two principles that I see are being undermined in a number of instances, namely transparency and accountability.”

The Vatican insisted it had little jurisdiction to sanction pedophile priests.

“Priests are not functionaries of the Vatican,” Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's U.N. ambassador in Geneva, told the committee. “Priests are citizens of their own states, and they fall under the jurisdiction of their own country.”

“When they say that these crimes should be prosecuted by states, it seems so disingenuous because we know that the church officials at the state level obstruct those efforts to bring justice,” said Barbara Blaine, president of the main U.S. victims group SNAP, or Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.